By Jim Dower: Undefeated welterweight contender Selcuk Aydin (20-0, 15 KO’s) defeated Ionut Dan Ion (26-1, 14 KO’s) by a controversial 12 round split decision on Saturday night to capture the obscure WBC Silver welterweight title at the Abdi Ipekci Spor Salonu, in Istanbul, Turkey. It was hard to score a lot of the rounds, because Jo-Jo Dan, who fought remarkably a lot like super middleweight Lucian Bute, lacked punching power. He just had nothing in his shots whatsoever.

Aydin, in contrast, was much more powerful but sloppy as anything, missing massive amounts of his punches and tiring badly in the later rounds. I had Dan winning the fight by at least four rounds because he did a good job of out-boxing the crude looking Adyin in many of the rounds. However, Aydin was fighting at home and a visiting fighter needs to do a little bit more to get a win against a home fighter, as most boxing fans already know full well.

Aydin scored effectively when he was able to get in close, but he missed so many of his punches and looked sloppy. Dan was hardly better, landing a lot of slapping punches to the gloves of Aydin and just looking like he had absolutely no energy at all in his shots. It wasn’t that Jo-Jo Dan was tired, because he didn’t fade nearly as bad as Aydin. It’s that Dan had zero power on his punches and looked kind of out of place at times against the much more powerful Aydin.

I wouldn’t call this a rip off because I could see where the judges would be more impressed with Aydin’s power shots compared to the weak slaps that Dan was offering up. Also, Dan didn’t help himself by running around the ring all night long like a weak version of Floyd Mayweather Jr.